One of the challenges is that there's a lot of anecdotal evidence supporting the issue you're raising—of small firms being created, starting up, and just not having the capability, and usually it's a shortage of financing, to be able to carry them on to a bigger stage, and therefore selling out perhaps a little too early, with their intellectual property going offshore, where it is then commercialized and perhaps the products sold back to Canada. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence to confirm that. However, we really don't have a lot of good data that I'm aware of that would permit a chance to really examine this in more detail and to understand the dynamics a little bit better.
Now, one of the things I have noticed recently in terms of StatsCan data, which looks at university research and development, is that it seemed to indicate that more than 50% of the licences that are offered by university tech transfer offices actually go to offshore companies. To me, if that is accurate, then that could indicate a very significant leakage in our system of trying to develop intellectual property in Canada from publicly funded research. We should be trying to maximize those opportunities.
Those, again, are the kinds of issues we need to explore I think with more rigour, as opposed to the anecdotal evidence, but certainly the anecdotal evidence would suggest....